“Eduard, you wouldn’t be here if you had just trusted me instead of hiring this incompetent bimbo.” She turned to Gabby. “Take your gun out of its holster, set it on the ground, and slide it to me, slowly,” Fran commanded in a used-to-guns, been-a-spy-for-a-while kind of way.
Gabby laughed. “You know they wouldn’t trust me with a gun.”
“I wasn’t born yesterday.”
“No, I really don’t have a gun.”
“What’s that then?” Fran pointed to the dart gun. “I’m not blind.”
“Oh, this?” She didn’t say “old thing,” but her tone strongly implied it. Gabby held up her dart gun. “It’s not lethal.” When Fran gave her a hard look, Gabby gave up and slid the gun across the floor. For all the complaining she’d done about it, she’d never been so sad to see something go. Goodbye, only hope.
“Are you people serious?” Fran looked at Alice and Markus. In an accusatory tone, she said, “She’s not even armed. Didn’t you think she could handle a gun?” She shook her head slowly and looked meaningfully between them, zip-tied on the floor, and at Gabby, the one who’d restrained them.
Maybe Fran was the bad guy, but Gabby appreciated the vote of confidence.
“So what is the endgame here?” Fran said looking around the room, obviously confused. “Were you going to tie them all up and… what… have an open, honest conversation? A little restorative circle.”
Restorative circle—that sounded like some Waldorf School lingo. Fran and her kid’s tuition. Was this the reason that Franwas doing all of this? The LA schools weren’t good, but were theythatbad?
“Or is thisScooby-Doo?” Fran smiled. “You gathered everyone and are about to unmask the owner of the fairground who has been disguised as a monster…” Fran arched an eyebrow. “Which I guess makes me the monster.”
Whoever decided to bring back mom jeans was the real monster. But Fran was right aboutScooby-Doo. Fran had her there.
“It didn’t even occur to you that I was the mole, did it?”
Gabby shook her head slowly while Fran gave her a disappointed look that burned to her core.
“I’m sorry.” Gabby was the same as the rest of society, dismissing a woman in unflattering pants as a credible threat.
“You’re not the only frumpy mom flying under the radar in the spy world,” Fran said.
Frumpy? Fran could speak for herself. But she was guilty. “I’m sorry for underestimating you,” Gabby said.
“Gabby, you’re apologizing to a woman threatening you with a gun,” Markus said sounding exasperated, stating what should be obvious.
That was a good point. Fran deserved to be taken seriously as a bad guy instead of called Jan and forgotten. But there was more to it than gender. The person walking through the whole office with a take-out container demanding, “Is this yours?” could not be a spy. That was a deep embed, someone who’d been there for years, not only blending but defining the office culture.
Softer, Gabby said, “You killed Darcy, didn’t you?”
Fran shrugged. “You can imagine my surprise when you showed up a week later and didn’t try to kill me.”
“Why didn’t you rat me out to Smirnov?” Gabby asked.
Smirnov answered that one. “Because she couldn’t tell me she killed Darcy. They both worked for me.”
“Can I just clear something up?” Gabby said. “I thought you had to be Russian to join the Russian Mafia.”
Fran rolled her eyes, and Smirnov made a palms-up gesture. “There’s some gray area.”
Gabby was still struggling to put it together. Fran had seemed like such a committed eStocks employee, such a brownnoser. “I thought you wanted to be Kramer’s assistant,” Gabby said. She had been one hundred percent convinced.
“I said I wanted your job. I didn’t say which one. You have several.”
Gabby flashed back to the conversation at Starbucks:
“And then, wham, someone else is hired from outside the organization and given the good work. Happens every time.”
“Who was hired above you?”
